During this time that Jurgis was looking for work occurred
the death of little Kristoforas, one of the children of Teta Elzbieta.
Both Kristoforas and his brother, Juozapas, were cripples, the latter having
lost one leg by having it run over, and Kristoforas having congenital dislocation
of the hip, which made it impossible for him ever to walk. He was the last
of Teta Elzbieta's children, and perhaps he had been intended by nature
to let her know that she had had enough. At any rate he was wretchedly
sick and undersized; he had the rickets, and though he was over three years
old, he was no bigger than an ordinary child of one. All day long he would
crawl around the floor in a filthy little dress, whining and fretting;
because the floor was full of drafts he was always catching cold, and snuffling
because his nose ran. This made him a nuisance, and a source of endless
trouble in the family. For his mother, with unnatural perversity, loved
him best of all her children, and made a perpetual fuss over him--would
let him do anything undisturbed, and would burst into tears when his fretting
drove Jurgis wild.

And now he died. Perhaps it was the smoked sausage he
had eaten that morning--which may have been made out of some of the tubercular
pork that was condemncd as unfit for export. At any rate, an hour after
eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he
was rolling about on the floor in convulsions. Little Kotrina, who was
all alone with him, ran out screaming for help, and after a while a doctor
came, but not until Kristoforas had howled his last howl. No one was really
sorry about this except poor Elzbieta, who was inconsolable. Jurgis announced
that so far as he was concerned the child would have to be buried by the
city, since they had no money for a funeral; and at this the poor woman
almost went out of her senses, wringing her hands and screaming with grief
and despair. Her child to be buried in a pauper's grave! And her stepdaughter
to stand by and hear it said without protesting! It was enough to make
Ona's father rise up out of his grave to rebuke her! If it had come to
this, they might as well give up at once, and be buried all of them together!.
. . In the end Marija said that she would help with ten dollars; and Jurgis
being still obdurate, Elzbieta went in tears and begged the money from
the neighbors, and so little Kristoforas had a mass and a hearse with white
plumes on it, and a tiny plot in a graveyard with a wooden cross to mark
the place. The poor mother was not the same for months after that; the
mere sight of the floor where little Kristoforas had crawled about would
make her weep. He had never had a fair chance, poor little fellow, she
would say. He had been handicapped from his birth. If only she had heard
about it in time, so that she might have had that great doctor to cure
him of his lameness!. . . Some time ago, Elzbieta was told, a Chicago billionaire
had paid a fortune to bring a great European surgeon over to cure his little
daughter of the same disease from which Kristoforas had suffered. And because
this surgeon had to have bodies to demonstrate upon, he announced that
he would treat the children of the poor, a piece of magnanimity over which
the papers became quite eloquent. Elzbieta, alas, did not read the papers,
and no one had told her; but perhaps it was as well, for just then they
would not have had the carfare to spare to go every day to wait upon the
surgeon, nor for that matter anybody with the time to take the child.

All this while that he was seeking for work, there was
a dark shadow hanging over Jurgis; as if a savage beast were lurking somewhere
in the pathway of his life, and he knew it, and yet could not help approaching
the place. There are all stages of being out of work in Packingtown, and
he faced in dread the prospect of reaching the lowest. There is a place
that waits for the lowest man--the fertilizer plant!

The men would talk about it in awe-stricken whispers.
Not more than one in ten had ever really tried it; the other nine had contented
themselves with hearsay evidence and a peep through the door. There were
some things worse than even starving to death. They would ask Jurgis if
he had worked there yet, and if he meant to; and Jurgis would debate the
matter with himself. As poor as they were, and making all the sacrifices
that they were, would he dare to refuse any sort of work that was offered
to him, be it as horrible as ever it could? Would he dare to go home and
eat bread that had been earned by Ona, weak and complaining as she was,
knowing that he had been given a chance, and had not had the nerve to take
it?--And yet he might argue that way with himself all day, and one glimpse
into the fertilizer works would send him away again shuddering. He was
a man, and he would do his duty; he went and made application--but surely
he was not also required to hope for success!

The fertilizer works of Durham's lay away from the rest
of the plant. Few visitors ever saw them, and the few who did would come
out looking like Dante, of whom the peasants declared that he had been
into hell. To this part of the yards came all the "tankage" and the waste
products of all sorts; here they dried out the bones,--and in suffocating
cellars where the daylight never came you might see men and women and children
bending over whirling machines and sawing bits of bone into all sorts of
shapes, breathing their lungs full of the fine dust, and doomed to die,
every one of them, within a certain definite time. Here they made the blood
into albumen, and made other foul-smelling things into things still more
foul-smelling. In the corridors and caverns where it was done you might
lose yourself as in the great caves of Kentucky. In the dust and the steam
the electric lights would shine like far-off twinkling stars--red and blue-green
and purple stars, according to the color of the mist and the brew from
which it came. For the odors of these ghastly charnel houses there may
be words in Lithuanian, but there are none in English. The person entering
would have to summon his courage as for a cold-water plunge. He would go
in like a man swimming under water; he would put his handkerchief over
his face, and begin to cough and choke; and then, if he were still obstinate,
he would find his head beginning to ring, and the veins in his forehead
to throb, until finally he would be assailed by an overpowering blast of
ammonia fumes, and would turn and run for his life, and come out half-dazed.

On top of this were the rooms where they dried the "tankage,"
the mass of brown stringy stuff that was left after the waste portions
of the carcasses had had the lard and tallow dried out of them. This dried
material they would then grind to a fine powder, and after they had mixed
it up well with a mysterious but inoffensive brown rock which they brought
in and ground up by the hundreds of carloads for that purpose, the substance
was ready to be put into bags and sent out to the world as any one of a
hundred different brands of standard bone phosphate. And then the farmer
in Maine or California or Texas would buy this, at say twenty-five dollars
a ton, and plant it with his corn; and for several days after the operation
the fields would have a strong odor, and the farmer and his wagon and the
very horses that had hauled it would all have it too. In Packingtown the
fertilizer is pure, instead of being a flavoring, and instead of a ton
or so spread out on several acres under the open sky, there are hundreds
and thousands of tons of it in one building, heaped here and there in haystack
piles, covering the floor several inches deep, and filling the air with
a choking dust that becomes a blinding sandstorm when the wind stirs.

It was to this building that Jurgis came daily, as if
dragged by an unseen hand. The month of May was an exceptionally cool one,
and his secret prayers were granted; but early in June there came a record-breaking
hot spell, and after that there were men wanted in the fertilizer mill.

The boss of the grinding room had come to know Jurgis
by this time, and had marked him for a likely man; and so when he came
to the door about two o'clock this breathless hot day, he felt a sudden
spasm of pain shoot through him--the boss beckoned to him! In ten minutes
more Jurgis had pulled off his coat and overshirt, and set his teeth together
and gone to work. Here was one more difficulty for him to meet and conquer!

His labor took him about one minute to learn. Before him
was one of the vents of the mill in which the fertilizer was being ground--
rushing forth in a great brown river, with a spray of the finest dust flung
forth in clouds. Jurgis was given a shovel, and along with half a dozen
others it was his task to shovel this fertilizer into carts. That others
were at work he knew by the sound, and by the fact that he sometimes collided
with them; otherwise they might as well not have been there, for in the
blinding dust storm a man could not see six feet in front of his face.
When he had filled one cart he had to grope around him until another came,
and if there was none on hand he continued to grope till one arrived. In
five minutes he was, of course, a mass of fertilizer from head to feet;
they gave him a sponge to tie over his mouth, so that he could breathe,
but the sponge did not prevent his lips and eyelids from caking up with
it and his ears from filling solid. He looked like a brown ghost at twilight--from
hair to shoes he became the color of the building and of everything in
it, and for that matter a hundred yards outside it. The building had to
be left open, and when the wind blew Durham and Company lost a great deal
of fertilizer.

Working in his shirt sleeves, and with the thermometer
at over a hundred, the phosphates soaked in through every pore of Jurgis'
skin, and in five minutes he had a headache, and in fifteen was almost
dazed. The blood was pounding in his brain like an engine's throbbing;
there was a frightful pain in the top of his skull, and he could hardly
control his hands. Still, with the memory of his four months' siege behind
him, he fought on, in a frenzy of determination; and half an hour later
he began to vomit--he vomited until it seemed as if his inwards must be
torn into shreds. A man could get used to the fertilizer mill, the boss
had said, if he would make up his mind to it; but Jurgis now began to see
that it was a question of making up his stomach.

At the end of that day of horror, he could scarcely stand.
He had to catch himself now and then, and lean against a building and get
his bearings. Most of the men, when they came out, made straight for a
saloon--they seemed to place fertilizer and rattlesnake poison in one class.
But Jurgis was too ill to think of drinking--he could only make his way
to the street and stagger on to a car. He had a sense of humor, and later
on, when he became an old hand, he used to think it fun to board a streetcar
and see what happened. Now, however, he was too ill to notice it--how the
people in the car began to gasp and sputter, to put their handkerchiefs
to their noses, and transfix him with furious glances. Jurgis only knew
that a man in front of him immediately got up and gave him a seat; and
that half a minute later the two people on each side of him got up; and
that in a full minute the crowded car was nearly empty--those passengers
who could not get room on the platform having gotten out to walk.

Of course Jurgis had made his home a miniature fertilizer
mill a minute after entering. The stuff was half an inch deep in his skin--
his whole system was full of it, and it would have taken a week not merely
of scrubbing, but of vigorous exercise, to get it out of him. As it was,
he could be compared with nothing known to men, save that newest discovery
of the savants, a substance which emits energy for an unlimited time, without
being itself in the least diminished in power. He smelled so that he made
all the food at the table taste, and set the whole family to vomiting;
for himself it was three days before he could keep anything upon his stomach--he
might wash his hands, and use a knife and fork, but were not his mouth
and throat filled with the poison?

And still Jurgis stuck it out! In spite of splitting headaches
he would stagger down to the plant and take up his stand once more, and
begin to shovel in the blinding clouds of dust. And so at the end of the
week he was a fertilizer man for life--he was able to eat again, and though
his head never stopped aching, it ceased to be so bad that he could not
work.

So there passed another summer. It was a summer of prosperity,
all over the country, and the country ate generously of packing house products,
and there was plenty of work for all the family, in spite of the packers'
efforts to keep a superfluity of labor. They were again able to pay their
debts and to begin to save a little sum; but there were one or two sacrifices
they considered too heavy to be made for long--it was too bad that the
boys should have to sell papers at their age. It was utterly useless to
caution them and plead with them; quite without knowing it, they were taking
on the tone of their new environment. They were learning to swear in voluble
English; they were learning to pick up cigar stumps and smoke them, to
pass hours of their time gambling with pennies and dice and cigarette cards;
they were learning the location of all the houses of prostitution on the
"Levee," and the names of the "madames" who kept them, and the days when
they gave their state banquets, which the police captains and the big politicians
all attended. If a visiting "country customer" were to ask them, they could
show him which was "Hinkydink's" famous saloon, and could even point out
to him by name the different gamblers and thugs and "hold-up men" who made
the place their headquarters. And worse yet, the boys were getting out
of the habit of coming home at night. What was the use, they would ask,
of wasting time and energy and a possible carfare riding out to the stockyards
every night when the weather was pleasant and they could crawl under a
truck or into an empty doorway and sleep exactly as well? So long as they
brought home a half dollar for each day, what mattered it when they brought
it? But Jurgis declared that from this to ceasing to come at all would
not be a very long step, and so it was decided that Vilimas and Nikalojus
should return to school in the fall, and that instead Elzbieta should go
out and get some work, her place at home being taken by her younger daughter.

Little Kotrina was like most children of the poor, prematurely
made old; she had to take care of her little brother, who was a cripple,
and also of the baby; she had to cook the meals and wash the dishes and
clean house, and have supper ready when the workers came home in the evening.
She was only thirteen, and small for her age, but she did all this without
a murmur; and her mother went out, and after trudging a couple of days
about the yards, settled down as a servant of a "sausage machine."

Elzbieta was used to working, but she found this change
a hard one, for the reason that she had to stand motionless upon her feet
from seven o'clock in the morning till half-past twelve, and again from
one till half-past five. For the first few days it seemed to her that she
could not stand it--she suffered almost as much as Jurgis had from the
fertilizer, and would come out at sundown with her head fairly reeling.
Besides this, she was working in one of the dark holes, by electric light,
and the dampness, too, was deadly--there were always puddles of water on
the floor, and a sickening odor of moist flesh in the room. The people
who worked here followed the ancient custom of nature, whereby the ptarmigan
is the color of dead leaves in the fall and of snow in the winter, and
the chameleon, who is black when he lies upon a stump and turns green when
he moves to a leaf. The men and women who worked in this department were
precisely the color of the "fresh country sausage" they made.

The sausage-room was an interesting place to visit, for
two or three minutes, and provided that you did not look at the people;
the machines were perhaps the most wonderful things in the entire plant.
Presumably sausages were once chopped and stuffed by hand, and if so it
would be interesting to know how many workers had been displaced by these
inventions. On one side of the room were the hoppers, into which men shoveled
loads of meat and wheelbarrows full of spices; in these great bowls were
whirling knives that made two thousand revolutions a minute, and when the
meat was ground fine and adulterated with potato flour, and well mixed
with water, it was forced to the stuffing machines on the other side of
the room. The latter were tended by women; there was a sort of spout, like
the nozzle of a hose, and one of the women would take a long string of
"casing" and put the end over the nozzle and then work the whole thing
on, as one works on the finger of a tight glove. This string would be twenty
or thirty feet long, but the woman would have it all on in a jiffy; and
when she had several on, she would press a lever, and a stream of sausage
meat would be shot out, taking the casing with it as it came. Thus one
might stand and see appear, miraculously born from the machine, a wriggling
snake of sausage of incredible length. In front was a big pan which caught
these creatures, and two more women who seized them as fast as they appeared
and twisted them into links. This was for the uninitiated the most perplexing
work of all; for all that the woman had to give was a single turn of the
wrist; and in some way she contrived to give it so that instead of an endless
chain of sausages, one after another, there grew under her hands a bunch
of strings, all dangling from a single center. It was quite like the feat
of a prestidigitator--for the woman worked so fast that the eye could literally
not follow her, and there was only a mist of motion, and tangle after tangle
of sausages appearing. In the midst of the mist, however, the visitor would
suddenly notice the tense set face, with the two wrinkles graven in the
forehead, and the ghastly pallor of the cheeks; and then he would suddenly
recollect that it was time he was going on. The woman did not go on; she
stayed right there--hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twisting
sausage links and racing with death. It was piecework, and she was apt
to have a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had
arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did, with
all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for a glance at the
well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some
wild beast in a menagerie.